Protocol independent multicast (PIM) is a family of multicast routing protocols for Internet Protocol (IP) networks that provides the distribution of data over a local area network (LAN), wide area network (WAN), or the Internet. In a virtual private network (VPN) with hub and spoke deployment, data is typically transmitted from a single hub to multiple spoke sites. For example, in a multicast VPN, sources of data are mostly co-located in a data center and accordingly, data is transmitted from a single site (e.g., data center) to multiple sites by way of point-to-multipoint (P2MP) label switched paths. If PIM is used in the hub and spoke deployment to assign data traffic to one or more P2MP label switched paths, it needs bidirectional connectivity, such as a full mesh. However, the construction and maintenance of a full mesh may, for example, consume a large amount of bandwidth. Furthermore, a P2MP label switched path is unidirectional, and is therefore incompatible with the bidirectional nature of PIM.